Sample Discussion Questions:
Data and AI Sovereign by Design
1. Sovereignty — the real version When you say “data sovereignty” inside your organization, does everyone mean the same thing? Is it still mostly about where the data is stored, or has the definition expanded to cover where models run, who can see the intelligence your data produces, and whether vendors are quietly training on it?
2. The context layer most people skip Off-the-shelf models bring design knowledge — but your organization runs on discovered knowledge. The terminology your teams use, the workflows that differ by program or client segment, the policies that are specific to your mandate. How much of that has actually been captured and made available to your AI systems — and how much is still locked in people’s heads and email threads?
3. Personal, business, and industry context The same question asked by two different people, in two different departments, operating under two different regulatory frameworks, should probably get three different answers. Is your AI stack set up to understand who’s asking, what your organization means by the terms in the question, and what the Canadian or sector-specific context demands — or is it still treating every prompt the same?
4. Explainability and observability as a side effect of doing it right When the context layer is built properly, explainability and observability come along for the ride — because every action and decision is grounded and captured. If a regulator, your Auditor General, or your minister asked tomorrow why an agent did what it did, how good would your answer be today?
5. Agents specifically — the governance gap that’s opening fast Models answer questions. Agents take actions. The governance frameworks most organizations have were designed for the first problem. How are you thinking about agents that act autonomously — approving, routing, communicating, deciding — and what does accountability look like when the action chain is three steps removed from a human?
6. The forward-looking close If you could fix one thing in the next 12 months — sovereignty infrastructure, the context layer, or the governance around autonomous agents — what would it be? And what is actually stopping you?